24 See Dokumente der deutschen Politik, Vol. IV. Actually
30th June 1934 is one of the most crucial dates in the
history of National Socialism, certainly not much less
far-reaching than, for example, 30th January 1933; for it
not only marked the elimination of all oppositional
stirrings, whether within the SA, the Wehrmacht or the
bourgeoisie, and swept away the last guarantees of the due-
process of law by Hitlers appointment of himself as supreme
judge, but also opened to the SS the way to their later
power. At the end of the 1930s Himmler was in actual fact
the most powerful man of the regime after Hitler. Stalin, at
the signing of the Moscow Agreement, proposed in addition to
a toast to Hitler a toast to Himmler as the 'guarantor of
order in Germany'; see Rosenberg, Politisches Tagebuch,
entry for 5th October 1959.